Victor Venema, a Dutch climate scientist with a blog who works in Germany, has a short post up noting that Germans are treated by other nationalities as if they personally started World War 2. And many Germans feel guilt about it, no matter how many decades after the war they were born.
I didn't really appreciate that this was still such an issue, but apparently it is...
It could well emanate from post WW2 days when most Germans said they had no idea of what was going on. Gellately demolished this lie a long time ago. the Gestapo would bot have been able to do anything without significant input from Germans across the board.
ReplyDeleteinteresting this still is in evidence now
The war is easily the single biggest item of historical significance that figures in people's minds when they think about Germany.
ReplyDeleteThe Baron and I may be travelling through Germany soon and it's amazing how frequently sites of old wartime horrors appear in tourist guides. There's a whole gory industry built around travelling to these sites.
And I'm sitting back and thinking, I'm not learning German to read Mein Kampf, FFS! There's another two millenia of culture in the German language and nation that is getting passed over for this.
One of the exercises in our German class was to come up with presentations about significant figures, either in German history or our own. My team did Bob Hawke. Other teams, for some reason, did people like Ulrike Meinhof and Leni Riefenstahl. Why???? "Don't mention the war" has a sound principle behind it - bringing up past traumas is lazy and weird and impolite.
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